What We Saw(33)

Because of their pronouncement, this video now shows you more than you thought you saw when you watched it the first time.

Two people with perfect skin and straight, white teeth have just explained that there’s more here than a simple pep rally. Their eyes seem to be staring through the screen directly at me. Accusing me. Blaming me. Lumping me in with all of the other kids in that gym. According to them, we aren’t individual students. We aren’t people with our own thoughts and opinions.

We’re a mob and we are circling the wagons to protect our own.

Dad clicks pause just before the broadcast cuts to a commercial and wordlessly walks to the kitchen to get another beer. Mom shakes her head and follows him. I hear her pulling food out of the fridge and putting a pan on the stove. I stare at the frozen screen, and just when I realize what I’m looking at, Will sees it, too.

“No way!” he crows. “I’m on TV!”

Mom and Dad both come back to the living room. Coach’s face is a blur in the foreground, but there in the center of the screen is Will, his arm raised next to Ben’s, chanting along, black tube socks pulled up to his knees over his jeans. Will races out of the room. “I have to text Tyler! Don’t delete this, Dad.”

I wait for Dad to say something, but he only grunts and hits play, filling the living room with another few seconds of the chant. Mom sighs and goes back to the kitchen. I keep waiting for someone to say something. When no one does, I know what I have to do after dinner, because this video doesn’t give you the whole story. It doesn’t even try to.

There’s more to what’s happening in this footage than two news anchors can discuss in a ninety-second live report. It doesn’t show you that some of the students standing in those bleachers would like to know what really happened Saturday night. It can’t explain that some of us used to call Stacey Stallard a friend. It can’t assure you that not everyone has decided who’s guilty or picked a side or even understands where the battle lines are drawn. It can’t show you that a girl was missing from the drill team on the court, or that I want to know what she has to say.

And in that sense, this video doesn’t show you anything at all.





UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE


HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................





nineteen


AFTER DINNER, I tell Mom I need some new lipstick for the Spring Fling tomorrow night, which is true. I also need a bracelet. I know that Buccs Buy Local! and all that, but at eight thirty on a weeknight, there’s not much open in this town, and I won’t have time after school tomorrow. Besides, the Walmart Supercenter has decent makeup, and sometimes their jewelry isn’t bad. You just have to know where to look. Plus, I’m on a budget.

Mom asks if I want her to come with me, but I tell her no. I have one more stop to make after I shop.

The turnoff for the Coral Creek Mobile Village is just a quarter mile past the Walmart. I’ve only been here a few times.

Back in seventh grade I rode along when Mom would drop off Stacey after LeeAnne got home from her double shift. A lot has changed in the years since. The trees used to hide the trailers from the service road, but when the Supercenter went in, they bulldozed everything right up to the creek and built a wall to block noise and light. Now, instead of oaks and maples, the back row of mobile homes is bordered by cinder blocks, and the creek is on the Walmart side.

The darkness is punctuated by random porch lights. Cats scamper beneath parked cars, eyes glowing like sentinels. Several times I hit the brake as two boys and a girl on bicycles weave on and off the main drive through hard-packed dirt yards. The girl is six years old at most and wears a camouflage tank top. The boys might be a couple years older, but one of them is wearing flip-flops, and the idea of having bare feet makes me shiver a little right now. The three of them look like they’re racing to the beach even though it’s been overcast and in the fifties again the past few days. I wonder where their parents are. I never saw the backside of eight thirty p.m. until I was in junior high. Don’t these kids have a bedtime?

I slow down as I approach the row where Stacey’s place sits one in from the corner. It’s set back against the wall that now skirts the whole trailer park.

Park.

That word generally makes me think of wide-open spaces, filled with green: grass, trees, life in general. It is clear that in this park the term refers to a vehicle that has come to a stop. There are scores of them here, trailers anchored beneath the alien glow of the Supercenter parking lot. The light spills over the high wall and casts a weird lavender haze into the sky over Coral Creek.

I pull Dad’s truck over on the side of the main drag and turn off the engine and the lights. Stacey’s trailer looks exactly as I remember it, only it may be painted a different color. The whole place is tidy—standing in stark contrast to the neighbors on both sides. At the trailer to the left, a broken screen door flaps in the breeze, banging against the paneling every few seconds. At the place on the right, there are several giant stacks of tires, overgrown with weeds that obscure the steps leading up to the door.

I slip out of the truck, close the door, and lean against it for a moment. A little white picket fence rings Stacey’s front yard. As I click open the gate, a Doberman in the trailer next door heaves himself against the window, snarling and barking, jaws snapping, claws against glass. I jump what feels like a foot in the air, then remind myself to breathe.